Irish Land and Labour Association - Middle-class Hostility

Middle-class Hostility

However where initial success such as the election of five of the Association's Central Council to County Councils, it was nullified by the continued domination of farmers and landowners in the local authorities. Where the Land and Labour Association clashed with middle-class interests, it was excluded from all effective political action, which even led to the exclusion of the labourers from United Irish League meetings. The belief of J.F.X. O'Brien and others was that there should be no separate labour organisation alongside the UIL, which attempted to tactfully bring the Association and its followers under its wing. John Redmond's sedulous refusal to consider direct Parliamentary representation for the Land and Labour Association was but an instance of the middle-class obsession with maintaining its hold over national politics.

The desire to keep the labouring class in tow prompted the United Irish League to eventually give the Land and Labour Association entry to national councils in 1900. The failure of the UIL and the Irish Party to either refer to the labourers in their deliberations or to do anything for them at Westminster indicated the Associations intended subservient position. It took the Mid-Cork by-election of 1901 to show that the understanding between the UIL and the ILLA was paper-thin. When it became clear that the ILLA candidate, D. D. Sheehan, was going to make an impact, he was accused of being an "anti-Healyite" and that his first allegiance was to the labourers rather than to the party, expressed the class bias of the Irish Party against the workers.